East of England Lifelong Learning Support

 

Lead Contact: Mark Leyland (mark.leyland@move.ac.uk)

JISC Programme: Distributed e-Learning programme

Lead Institution and Partners: University of Hertfordshire (L), University of Luton (now University of Bedfordshire)

 

Project Dates: March 2005 - December 2006

 

Case study tags: online learning, e-portfolios,university of hertfordshire, e-portfolios for application, e-portfolios considerations - defining requirements, e-portfolios considerations - interoperability, learner perspectives on e-portfolios, e-portfolios considerations - legal, lifelong learning drivers for e-portfolios, e-portfolios for planning, widening participation drivers for e-portfolios, institutional perspectives on e-portfolios

 

Background & Context

 

What is the background to the e-portfolio initiative?

 

EELLS was a JISC project funded to explore the issues and benefits of setting up a portal-based e-portfolio service for lifelong learners within the East of England region through the development of a pilot service.

 

The project sought to build a practical demonstration model developed from previous JISC work. The EELLS regional demonstrator was based on SHELL (Southwest Hosts Enhancing Lifelong Learning), developed at the University of Plymouth. The SHELL system had already defined specifications for student records, created working models and provided examples of good practice within this area. This regional demonstrator would be a scalable support service for learners independent of institutional systems.

 

EELLS uses a client-centred model of progression appropriate to lifelong learning, where ownership and control of the information is transferred from the institution to the individual but with appropriate authentication for institutional progress files. The EELLS e-portfolio therefore consists of a personal digital archive containing personal information, records of achievement and artefacts, transcript-type data supplied from official institutional transcripts, and information on the people and organisations to which the owner has granted access. This will include the provision of lifelong learner records for the presentation of learner achievements to educational establishments or employers and with utilities to facilitate the application process.

 

The intended market for EELLS is lifelong learners - people of any age or educational background.

 

What was the purpose and intended outcomes of the initiative?

 

The overall aim of the project was to create an e-portfolio demonstrator that could be piloted with learners within a regional context. The pilots were intended to explore the requirements of learners within the client-centred model of progression and to build learner requirements into the software development cycle to produce a service of value to learners.

 

Priority was given to the development of an intuitive system, suitable for learners with diverse levels of IT skills, to facilitate the creation of various types of e-portfolio that could be shared with other people.

 

The functionality would include accessing learner records, personal development planning tools, CV builder and publisher and uploading files to a secure repository.

 

How was the initiative implemented?

The EELLS e-portfolio was split into the following five tools available from the menu-driven learner portal. These are:

 

• File repository (artefact upload and storage)
• Learner records (transcript-type data from the institutional MIS)
• Showcase and CV builder tools (presentational materials)
• Personal development planning (PDP) tool (generic framework taken from the Learning Matrix project)
• Course catalogue

 

Two Administration portals were developed for the management of learner records by system administrators and the EELLS Project Team. Some of the utilities developed have been adopted and used by other JISC DEL projects. These are the learner administration portal and the system management portal (ioAgent/ioNode administration).

 

The issue of data protection was considered at the planning stage of the project and all applications were developed with this in mind. Students participating in the pilots were required to sign a data consent form outlining the data protection policy for the EELLS e-portfolio system. The intention was to replace this with an electronic recording and notification system.

 

The project ran a number of pilots with learner groups from the partner institutions which attempted to explore their requirements. The evaluation centred on making the service available to a number of volunteer learners and observing them using the system, collecting usage data and inviting discussion and feedback around their experiences of using the system.

 

Different data were collected including observation data, collection of learner data, survey data, focus group data and user interface evaluation data. The sample size was not as large as anticipated due to the constraints of the project although there was a good mix of both academic and vocational students. However not many part-time students took part and no full-time work learners were involved.

 

Technology Used

 

What technologies and/or e-tools were available to you or did you seek to develop?

 

Tools

 

As no single e-portfolio system contained all the features or the ease of use that the project required, the project commissioned an e-portfolio extension to the ioNodes software from Phosphorix Ltd, using the OSPI concepts but with the intention of developing an intuitive showcase builder based on wizards and templates.

 

The technical concepts developed by the SHELL project were used for the underlying structure of the EELLS 'ioNetwork'. EELLS uses ioAgents to transform student records from institutional student record systems into IMS data that is stored and accessed via the EELLS ioNetwork. This has a distributed architecture similar to SHELL but uses the latest ioNode build. The ioNodes infrastructure provides a platform for rapid development of the e-portfolio tool kit and robust service centre. Each ioNode is a web-ready service host and the ioNetwork provides resilience.

 

The EELLS software, ioNetwork from Phosphorix, is 100% OSS5 open source software. SHELL included a proprietary component which was factored out and replaced with open source alternative ioMorph.

 

EELLS inherited a data transfer model based on IMS LIP and continued to use IMS LIP for the minor changes made to the learner record.

 

Standards and interoperability

 

Conformance to standards is essential for a potentially large-scale service linking a large number of educational institutions. Unfortunately these standards can be interpreted in different ways which was evidenced through our discussions with institutional MIS providers. This together with the time constraints influenced the e-portfolio developments. While the IMS e-portfolio Specification provided a base for developments, the priority was to provide sufficient functionality to enable learners to test and evaluate the usefulness of an e-portfolio service. Mapping the EELLS e-portfolio to IMS e-portfolio will be done at a future stage when the functionality is extended.